About
Since the founding of the Center for Dialogue & Pluralism (CDP; formerly Intergroup Dialogue Project) at Cornell in 2012, our program has expanded exponentially beyond our initial 40-person undergraduate course. Today, CDP’s work includes eight credit-bearing courses, orientation sessions for all incoming undergraduate students, college-wide initiatives to support faculty teaching, and more. A noteworthy development is a pathbreaking collaboration with ILR: the Center for Workplace Inclusion & Diversity Education (ILR WIDE), a key sponsor for this conference. While CDP’s programs have branched out in a multitude of directions, the heart of the program is still a commitment to communication across difference and critical hope, one that scrutinizes the structures of inequity we inhabit and chooses to believe in everyone’s capacity to create a more inclusive future. For this reason, as we celebrate ten years of achievement and impact, we also want to reflect collectively with our broader community (alumni, campus partners, and current students) in June 2023 for a reunion and conference, Directions for Dialogue: Ten Years CDP at Cornell.
In true dialogue fashion, our vision for this event is a collaborative effort to teach and learn from the unique experiences, perspectives, and expertise of our CDP community. Through industry-specific roundtable discussions, skill-sharing workshops, and community-building events, we will identify current DEI issues, practice dialogue-based skills and methods for approaching them, and build a network of support across industries. With ILR WIDE faculty, we will also examine the possibilities for dialogue in the workplace. Ultimately, we seek to understand: what good does dialogue enact in the world, and how can we continue imagining more inclusive ways of connecting with one another?
Directions for Dialogue: Ten Years of CDP at Cornell will convene our broader community to identify new directions for dialogic approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion work both on campus and beyond.